In the near future, it is expected that most vehicles will be able to access the Internet either contacting the Road-Side Units (RSUs) that compose the vehicular infrastructure (using IEEE 802.11p or IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n) or through cellular networks (3G and 4G). RSUs can also be used to improve connectivity and communication between vehicles. In order to grant that internet access, the mobility of the users must be supported to keep their sessions active while they are moving between access points.
In a general network context, several mobility protocols have already been proposed (and they are referenced at the end of this document) that can be used to support the users' mobility: (i) some provide full support for individual mobile node movement including the mobile node in the mobility process (for instance, MIPv6); (ii) others provide full support for individual mobile node movement without the need of any mobility related processing in the mobile node (for instance, PMIPv6); (iii) others provide full support for both individual mobile node movement and sub-network movement, including the mobile node in the mobility process (for instance, NEMO); (iv) others provide full support for both individual mobile node movement and sub-network movement, without the need of any mobility related processing in the mobile node (for instance, PNEMO). However, there are only a few studies of their application in a real vehicular environment or of their application with the IEEE 802.11p technology. Therefore, they do not always provide the best mechanisms for a correct application over a vehicular network.
These facts are disclosed in order to illustrate the technical problem addressed by the claimed invention.
Further References
    Carlos Ameixieira, José Matos, Ricardo Moreira, André Cardote, Arnaldo Oliveira, and Susana Sargento. An ieee 802.11 p/wave implementation with synchronous channel switching for seamless dual-channel access (poster). In Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC), 2011 IEEE, pages 214_221. IEEE, 2011    Jorge Dias, André Cardote, Filipe Neves, Susana Sargento, and Arnaldo Oliveira. Seamless horizontal and vertical mobility in vanet. In Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC), 2012 IEEE, pages 226_233. IEEE, 2012    Seil Jeon, Rui Aguiar, and Behcet Sarikaya. Network mobility support using mobile mag in proxy mobile ipv6 domain. IETF draft-sijeon-netext-mmag-pmip-00, 2012.    Fumio Teraoka and Tetsuya Arita. Pnemo: a network-based localized mobility management protocol for mobile networks. In Ubiquitous and Future Networks (ICUFN), 2011 Third International Conference on, pages 168_173. IEEE, 2011.